


"Something is shining like gold, but better"

by Pandora



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Tatooine Western, dear diary
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2018-12-13 19:22:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11766669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pandora/pseuds/Pandora
Summary: A young woman leaves her beautiful, peaceful life on Naboo to teach school in the wilderness of a certain desert rock run by Hutt crime lords.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> *This takes place (as you have no doubt deduced from the summary) on a familiar planet, but with new locations. I have thought, if mostly vaguely, of writing about "the other side of Tatooine" for years--and this is the story where that finally happens.
> 
> *Nothing original in here is anything so glorified as my "headcanon." It's just stuff I made up.
> 
> *The title is from Bruce Cockburn's song "Rumours of Glory."

There is only a week of time, and millions of kilometers of deadcold black space, between the world I came from and the one I have arrived on. Yes, I know—I would have only had to wait through a whirlwind of two days if I had taken a place on that new starline. But instead, I gave in and had one of the five private closet-rooms on the freighter, while nearly everyone else was crammed into the public rooms. There were two Pantorian families crowded into the one next to me. Once, when I was out on the walkway, I ran into one of the women. She was rocking a little sundrop-eyed doll of a child, the one I had just heard giving thin teakettle wails.  
  
She didn’t give me a burning hard glare, though it was what I deserved. I think, though I can’t be certain, that she gave me a little shivered smile. I wanted to apologize (as I cringed with a bright wounded flush), but of course, I didn’t. I kept my mouth properly clenched shut.  
  
The freighter fell out of hyperspace in the middle of the night. When I looked out the handmirror sized window in my room, I could only just make out the dark planet floating below me. There was only one fingerprint-bruise smudge of light in the lower hemisphere—and, while I have never seen a planet from orbit before, I know this isn’t how it should be.  
  
Then: I rode down to the surface, and the spaceport, on the supply shuttle. The landing field must have been nearly five kilometers away from the last edges of town. The office, the only building, was a small chalkwhite house that glowed with faded reflected starlight. I could only see the town itself as sleep-dulled lights out in the dark distance. Oh, and it was, and it still is, cold: the sort of knifesharp winter cold I wouldn’t have thought was possible in the desert. Yes, I had read that the temperatures drop at night, but I must not have known how to imagine what that would mean. The control officer told there would be frost on the sand at dawnlight, and I could only respond with a small numbed-sniff nod.  
  
I had to wait there for a long blur of hours, but it was still dark outside when I caught a northbound transport, which made one of its last two stops at this station. I had to sit on one of the silver droid-skinned crates they had just loaded, and I could feel the engine growl through the floor under my feet. I have been here for three hours now, and I still have kilometers, and hours, to go.  
  
Its official name is Erewhon Station. When I came in, one of the men at the counter told me, in a crooked sing-song voice: _Welcome to nowhere, honey_.  
  
So far as I can tell, it consists mostly of one main building, a long structure made up of puzzle pieces from other buildings, and even salvaged starship walls. It smells like speeder fuel and old soured metal engine parts and dust, and there is glittery sandgrit stamped into the floor—even though the droid that wanders without aim through the room has swept at it. There is a small portable heater with glaring-sore wires near the counter, but I can still feel the air outside through my cloak.  
  
I haven’t much to do here—which is why I have started writing in this file, and watching the words fall in like raindrop pebbles. But I oughtn’t complain. After all, I was supposed to have made my appearance here ten days ago, when their district driver leaves on the northern run that stops at Avalon. Presently, he is only an hour away, traveling towards Mos Entha on some sort of vague business matter, and so I have to wait.  
  
An hour ago, I had a cup of dark tea that tasted like tree bark—and I do like tea, _proper tea_. My stomach feels like a locked-tight fist, and I have made several trips outside to the box they use as a fresher. It is so dark out there behind the station lights, a velvetsoft blackness that I could nearly touch and push away from me, that I can’t see anything. There were only a few pin-pricked stars scattered across the field of the sky. I couldn’t even make out one of the moons.  
  
There are several little persons in rusted-brown robes sleeping together in a ragheap near the doorway, in the warm breeze from one of the fan-vents. One of them made a little mouse-pitched mumble when I walked, as carefully tip-toed as I could, past, but they didn’t leave their dreams. It might have been at the same faraway echo-howl of a speeder engine that I had heard.  
  
I have only spoken with one of the station workers, the one who has made the calls to arrange a transport for the rest of my journey. He introduced himself as Ciaran. He is scrawny-thin, like a wild tooka, and his rumpled hair is ashgrey. He looks to be in his fifties—but on this sort of world, I know, he might be years younger. His sing-song accent sounds vaguely familiar, and I have wondered if he came to this world, to this desert rock, from somewhere else.  
  
When he brought me the tea, I apologized for my inconveniently late arrival date. That was only after I had blinked at him: he looked older than he had from across the room, and he only has several little wooden brown teeth in the black cave of his mouth. He is around my height, or even shorter, so I had to look him directly in the face. But he only shrugged, and:  
  
_There’s no need for that_ , he said (and I quote) as he smacked his trouser pocket, checking for his cigarets. _We do things on desert time here. You’ll see_.  
  
Right now, as I type this, he is talking with the station supervisor, the older man wearing a dustbrown coverall, at his perch behind the counter. He nods and listens to Ciaran, and answers with an occasional grunted sentence. Ciaran has a long paperwhite cigaret dangling out of his mouth. They have a shared hahaha.  
  
Now the other man (and I have to admit that, unfortunately, all three of them are human men) has come back in from the garage-attachment wrapped up in a thick dirtysnow white jacket. He has black hair and spaceblack eyes, and frozen rosepetal white skin—like, of all the folklore characters I might have thought of, the winter queen Aerena. The resemblance ends there.  
  
_You know the rules, boys_ , the supervisor just said, with a shrug, and rattled the screen of his old tincan datapad. _They play, and we work_.  
  
The black haired man has turned his eyes toward me, or in my direction, as he nods: _Yeah Rory. I just don’t want to see you work yourself too hard_ \--  
  
He already knows who I am. They all know. My cloak, my plain forest-green wool winter cloak I didn’t think I would wear, must have cost more than he earns in a week. I have more, and too many clothes, similar clothes stuffed inside the luggage they carried in. I have a glossynew datapad, full of bright white filepages to write on. I am the _nice offworld lady_.  
  
Now the black haired man is letting out a sighing breath (in response to the supervisor’s last remark), and tucking a new cigaret between his lips. But I should end here, and walk about for a few minutes, even if it is only outside to that fresher. They are not watching me—and for the historical record, I am not watching, and then writing, about them.

\---

It has only been several weeks now since I was at Rosenrot for the weekend games of Elsé’s wedding. Oh, I know how it sounds—but while my greatest grandmother gave it that name, during one of her most dramatic and pretentious whims, it is only a cottage. The night before the ceremony, I managed to sneak out through the moon-lit dark to the neighborhood beach. It was all right—Mor had drifted back into the one proper-sized bedroom, and no one else minded. The burning moonglow of the cottage lights faded out behind me, but after the first blurred moment, I could see the wrinkled silk waves of the water, and the line of rowboats swaying next to the landing dock, quite well.  
  
There were several windows glowing with fireworks light in the Vancils’ sunstone villa on the other side of the swaying darkness of the lake. They might have been there, taking a weekend-holiday away from Theed, but I rather doubt it. Of course, the Vancils don’t bother with the other, lower residents—I don’t think I have ever so much as seen one of them.  
  
But we do all know the servants who maintain that echo-emptied mansion. They row over every year when we have the midsummer bonfire on the beach. Mirella Swan has worked there since she left school. Elsé is still summerfriends with her, though she doesn’t have the time to see us much—when we were last there, she was kept ragged waiting on the Little Vancil.  
  
(Oh, she understands, as they all do—to quote the knowing words of the station supervisor, _Rory_ —how things go: _They play, and we work_.)  
  
The lakeview picture window blinked out into darkness. I sat down in a crouch, and picked out a small rosepink rock from the clutter near the lace-fuzzed edge of the water. When I threw it out into the water, it left only a crack behind as it sank in. Then I picked up another one, and locked it inside my fisted hand. I was wandering about in thought, the sort that I’ve been writing down here—and while I know none of it matters, at least I have kept it silent and locked up in this file.  
  
I wore that emerald silk dress that Elsé had chosen, and had spent too many creds on, to have her honor-maiden wear. Of course (as Mor was too polite to even mention) Elsé looks well in green—but even though roseheads aren’t to wear that color, I still liked it. Elsé does keep my opinions in mind.  
  
She was staying in the bedroom with Mor, where her wedding dress hung from the door like a whisperthin ghost. But she had come to see me in the maid’s room earlier, before we left for the dinner party with her fiancé’s (or fine—husband’s) family. After she helped me with the last few closures on the back of the dress, she stayed in place behind me in the doorway. When I turned back around, she gave a twitched little smile, and I waited for her to speak.  
  
It’s difficult to know how to describe Elsé, although she has modeled for me several times: she looks like she is my sister, but she is thinner, with a pointed-sharp bird beak nose, and the fragile iceglass bones. Her hair isn’t anywhere near as red. She had her flower crown on, the one Mor and the aunts had made, but it was drooping down to her eyebrows. She was still barefoot, and I could see the theatre fan bones clenched in her feet. She had painted her toenails a gilded gold.  
  
She let out a little scarf-whisp of a breath, and I thought she was going to mention how it was unfortunate, that it was _a pity_ , that she hadn’t been able to see much of me. But instead she said: _I should have mentioned this before, I know. But I am sorry you’ve had to alter your plans_.  
  
_It wasn’t your fault_ , I said. Oh, I should admit that, when I first read her comm. call, I had blamed Elsé. I had made certain promises, and she knows what I think of that. But I can also say that what I told her was the truth: It was her bridegroom who had insisted, who actually demanded, that the wedding be changed to a later date for the sake of his great-grandmother.  
  
When she came in with him, clinging onto his arm, she turned out to be an old dear all done up in white-her skin was buried in snowpowder, and the skirt of her glaring white lace gown slunk along behind her on the floor. The whole family hovered about her, and when she spoke, with a dustsoft dove coo I could only just hear, they turned all their attention to listen. And--the one time she stumbled past me, on the floor of the village green--she smelled so bad I had to cough, to cover up the gag I could feel about to swell out of my throat.  
  
But if I’m going to trap this all down in a hard black forest of words, I shouldn’t be too unkind. It is only the least one can do for old people—now that they have used up most of their lives, and their youthful, pure ideals, and have retired away into the background.  
  
Later, on the beach, I looked back to the cabin. I could only hear the people still talking, and finishing a bottle of wine, inside as a rainstorm murmur song. Elsé was there in the center of attention, with the man who is now her husband. There isn’t much I can say about him. He is polite. He is (as nearly everyone has said) _nice_.  
  
_That makes him the typical Naboo man_ , the Girl would have said. (Her name, which I haven’t written in months, was Soleria—apparently, for reasons I shan’t attempt to understand, she had to change it when she became one of the Queen’s handmaidens. I can assume she did not mention her experience as an artist’s model, as my model, when she took on the sound of whatever name she has now.)  
  
It was the sort of thing I only barely had the nerve to do—but if I hadn’t, if I had only considered it as an idea, I would regret that now. It was difficult to get out of the dress by myself, but after several squirming-twisted wrenches, I managed it. Then once I had left it in folded in a pile around my underthings, I walked out into the water, until I could float up, and I leapt forward into the first fish-whipped stroke. I moved for ages inside the glass-bright cold water. It felt as though my skin, my bones, were becoming part of it.  
  
Finally, I floated onto the surface and lay on my back, staring up at the sky. The last clouds had dissolved hours before, and it was crowded with the stars. Roné was half full, but it was too low in the sky, behind the shadowed trees, for me to see. It occurred to me to look (out beyond The Beggar Witch, and the Ash Girl) for the pair of stars that marked Tatooine. But I couldn’t see them.  
  
There are no lakes here on Tatooine, a world circling around a pair of suns—and no rivers, and no little silver-bright creeks. That was only an abstract, faraway detail when I was reading over the few articles I could find on the planet—but oh, it had become suddenly, and inevitably, quite real. The fading memory of that night at the lake is all I have now.  
  
\--  
  
But I won’t miss the girl who was my one private art student. I met with Amidala (and obviously, that is her real name) for her last drawing lesson only the morning before I left for the lake. Her mother, the _Lady Vin_ , had insisted, through a hurried-terse comm. message, that I make the time, and the only excuse I have is that she paid a bonus for it. She might have even have the talent her mother, and personal handmaiden, think she does—and she could do more than the ghost-faded ryoo blossoms of the still-life her mother has framed in the sitting room. But in the end, talent has never mattered for much. It will matter who her mother is.  
  
It was her mother (or looming up behind her, the grandfather who spent two years on _the Royal Council_ ), who insisted she study the arts of drawing and watercolor. She would rather work on the shimmering light sheets of holopictures.  
  
Obviously, I don’t share the reactionary opinion certain professors I shan’t name here had about holowork. It is art, and it is real—but then, aside from that, one of those same teachers refused to include Gungan works in her art history courses, and then refused to be ashamed about it. But despite that, I learned, and I have continued on to teach, the oldest methods of art.  
  
But anyhow: Amidala spent most of the lesson in a whispergiggled gossip session with her maiden when she was supposed to be working on a new charpencil technique. She only finished a corner of the preliminary sketch. Usually, I would have gotten her attention with a looming glare, but this time, at the end, I didn’t see the point in it. I worked on some experimental drawings in my own sketchbook, and let them talk.  
  
This isn’t what I wanted to do with my life—teaching art as only a technique to the most lucky and privileged of girls who already have everything.  
  
Then: I’m twenty nine (and months, only a few months, away from my thirtieth birthday) years old, and perhaps that’s part of it. Of course, I’m still years away yet from my prime: while the visual arts might not be _the noblest art_ , like politics, I wasn’t finished by my nineteenth birthday. I might have gone on, easily and predictably, in that life, but I have gotten this one chance not to.  
  
After the hour was over, the handmaiden showed me out. She didn’t know that I had been sketching her in the closed pages of my sketchbook. It’s strange that it seems so normal: I gave lessons to Amidala for two years, and she was always, always present for them, but I don’t know one thing about her. I don’t even know her name.

\---

Since I have hours of time to use while Ciaran finishes sleeping, I took my sketchbook out from my luggage. It was buried in cloud-layers of skirts in the second one I searched through—but that is my own fault for allowing Mor, and Aunt Elaina, to interfere when I was out of the room. The page I left it open on is still an empty white wall. Then again, there isn’t much here to draw: this is a bar, a dark forestwood box of a room, hidden underneath the ragged castle canyonwall, with a sign at the window declaring, defiantly in Basic, EATS. The establishment is closed, but the sign still burns with a sullen candyred light through the sheet of freshraw sunlight outside.  
  
Yes, I know: it would be more accurate to say, or write, that I don’t know how to portray this place in a drawing. And I don’t know. Obviously, I have made this attempt at describing it, while I’m sitting here at the bar-counter, but it doesn’t have any meaning for me.  
  
The Girl would have said (and since I’ve mentioned her, and let her lost name burn in this file, once, that makes it only easier to do so again) that it takes a while to learn how to dream about a new place. I think she found that buried in a book she had read. It is quite a silly wisp of a thought--but I know what she meant, and why she took it to remember.  
  
But I should return to the subject: I don’t know how I managed to drift off into sleep as I sat in the social area back at the station. But after a while of waiting, my eyes felt like rusted-slow, broken chrono gears, and I snapped them shut, and then—several dark minutes later—I was jerking back up, and wiping at the drool that leaked from the corner of my mouth, to see Ciaran. No, he did not attempt to lick the precious moisture off my hand, as I thought he might for that first confused instant. I should hope that water isn’t that precious here.  
  
His voice had broken the darkness of my brief thin nap. He had come to tell me (he went on to explain) that he had just heard from the _person_ who had agreed to let me ride with him the entire way to Avalon. It turned out that he had canceled his stop here, along with the rest of the trip, while he remained back in a town with a name I can’t remember now.  
  
After I stared at Ciaran for a dazed-blank moment, I said, and I think I actually forced my mouth into a tiny smile: _I’m certain he has a good reason for that_.  
  
_Yeah, he had a reason_ , Ciaran said—he only said, but I could make out what he had been too polite to actually say. Then he moved away from that subject, and told me (while I twitched my head in a nod) that he had some errands that would end in Avalon, and while he still another few hours to work on his shift, once he had finished, we could leave.  
  
Oh: I knew he was making this trip now, on this particular day, for my benefit. But of course, I accepted his offer. It has been, as Ciaran said, better than sitting around inside that station for another day would have been. And the errands are real enough—he dragged several dustyellow wooden crates into the backroom here after we first arrived.  
  
He returned to his work in the garage area, and I opened this datapad. There was another message from Annah Darksun, one of my group of employers—since I shall be preparing her two teenaged children for their secondary school certificates from a distance, she didn’t see a reason that my late appearance should delay that. I sent over their first lesson packets while I was still at my flat, the morning I left for Rosenrot and the lake.  
  
This time, she had written only to say, after thanking me for updating her on my current arrival date, that her family would be making the trip into Avalon to meet me in person. Apparently, it “took some doing” to convince Delight Fardreamer, her husband, to leave their _farm_ for that long. Yes—his name is actually, and quite seriously, Delight. I wouldn’t have ever expected that.  
  
Once I had sent my response flying off into the void, I went into the office where my luggage was stacked in a corner to search out my black riding boots, the ones I’ve had since I was twenty-four, though I have only worn them those few times I rode one of the lodge tuskcats when I took that holiday in the mountains. While I was pulling them on, the droid appeared during its round to swat at my arched foot with a bright magenta added-on rouge brush. Or at least, I assumed that was a modified addition. I wonder what sort of droid it was originally supposed to be.  
  
When I walked (or rather, stomped) outside in them, the sky was just beginning to turn to a faded-cold grey—and through it, I could see the land around the station for the first time, a plain littered with small tangled-rough bushes and broken dark rocks that seemed to stretch out for klicks, up until the ragged black fringe of rocks near the skyline. It looked frozen-still in the new light—but I could see a footpath slinking off through the sandy dirt, and _something_ , a small shadow-dark fragment, darted between a pair of bushes.  
  
Ciaran and the Winter Prince were slouched against the porch rail in a wedding sheet veil of cigaret smoke. They only just moved their eyes to see me, and I returned the favor. Then a lakefly buzz engine snarl suddenly swelled in the distance—and the Winter Prince grinned, and stamped out the last sullen firebug spark of his cigaret. _Well, shit_ , he said.  
  
He came along with us for the trip. He gave a reason (he wanted, he said in a shrugged-off voice, to visit someone in Avalon), but I have to suppose he decided on that after Ciaran asked him—to assist with the driving, and to help me feel more at ease. I sat in the front with him, and the Winter Prince perched in the back. While they reminisced over an obsolete speeder model, I slumped down into the seat with my arms locked over my chest. My thoughts drifted about as I watched the plains, and the cloud-pale hills behind them, through the window.  
  
But Ciaran did include me as he discussed, over the first kilometers, the people he had contacted during his attempts to find me another ride, after his first _buddy_ had canceled an hour after he ought to have set out for the station: One of them had the poetical name of Moonspinner, and while he had been willing to help out, he had been occupied in the middle of an ice supply run.  
  
Then he said, while the Winter Prince’s reflection nodded in the viewfinder window: _So I tried the Bantha Kid, since the last I knew he was based in Avalon, but his com never even rang. He must be off deep in the beyond_.  
  
Yes: that is what he said, and I was startled, before I had thoughtfully considered each word, into speaking: _You mean this person is actually called the Bantha Kid_?  
  
The Winter Prince’s face broke up into a thunder-crashed laugh, and Ciaran actually gave a little birdsong-pitched titter before he said: _It’s his nickname, if you wanna get technical. But yeah, that’s what everyone calls him_.  
  
Then Ciaran’s own com rang, and he snapped it open and turned his attention over to the conversation with the static-fuzzed male voice on the other end. He would take two other, and similar, calls before he stopped his vehicle in front of the bar. The owner’s drowned moon face came up into view in the shadow-tinted front window. She turned out to be a dried-leaf _human_ woman with long grey hair trapped into braids and sunshine stained teeth.  
  
There isn’t much else to write about: I had a bowl of some sort of porridge the bar owner insisted on heating up for us. It tasted like road dust, but obviously, I am not so arrogant, or _selfish_ , that I complained—though I do wonder if all the food here shall be similar variations. Then (once she had retreated to her rooms, and Ciaran and the Winter Prince to their naps) I took out the tin of dried queenberries I had saved. It was buried away inside the same luggage as my sketchbook.  
  
Oh, and this: when I stepped out of the vehicle, I expected the sunlight glowing on the blood-stained dark ground to burn through me, but it wasn’t so bad. It has the hard dryness of sand, but I have read up enough on the desert to know that (unlike the swollen-damp, choking, perfumed air we have in the summers) it would be. It was still the first hours of the morning, so that might be it. But Ciaran did tell me, in passing, that it’s winter here now.  
  
I hadn’t so much as thought of that before. But of course: there would be a winter season here, even here in the desert. It might explain what that woman at the spaceport told me—there was, indeed, a glass-sharp glittering frost of snow on the sand this morning.


	2. Chapter 2

This morning, I had the experience of taking—or really, to be more accurate, enduring—my first sonic shower.  It sounds pathetic when I admit to it, I know, but I had put it off for nearly three days, and I might have waited longer.  But finally, I had to wash the wilted grease-dulled mess of my hair—and of course, I don’t wish to smell unpleasant.  The _sonic_ turned out to be a stall with a coarse stone floor, much like what I still think of as a proper shower.  After I took off my clothes, I stood inside and pushed the red button on the window glass wall—and the air shook into vibrating lights.  They were whispered-dry and silent, and made my teeth shiver together.

When the sonic finished several blurred moments later, it had indeed erased every speck of dirt from me—and I suspect it had removed some of my skin as well.  My hair had been pulled up into a static-shocked wave, and it crashed back down over my back.  I stood there for another minute, with my shoulders in a fist-clenched hunch, staring down at the floor, before I moved.

Oh, I oughtn’t complain:  they have to reserve nearly every shivering diamond drop of water they have here for other needs.  I know that.  This is the norm for them, and whether or not I actually believe it at this moment, I shall become accustomed to it.

I should have made a start on that when I was on the freighter—but along with my private cabin, my ticket included two of the exclusive water showers.  Most of the others passengers shared the bank of sonics.  I only used one of them, on the lowest setting, and spent five minutes standing under a thin raindrip of recycled water—and it didn’t make me feel any less guilty.  It’s only now that I have considered that all those people might not have envied me for it.

Then I put on my wrapper, and retreated down the hallway to the room I live in.  None of the occupants in the other rooms were about, and the empty air glittered with drifting snow dust motes.  But once the door was closed behind me, I took down one of the few dresses I have hung up from the end of the iron curtain bar.  I had spent enough hours alone in this room.  After I arrived here, my meandering journey finally already a memory, I only just had the energy to take off my boots before I dropped across the bed.  My eyes felt like burnt-dry wood, and I had a slight stiff headache, and I was lost in sleep as soon as I closed my eyes.  I must have slept for most of the first day.

When I woke up in the faded evening light glowing through the curtains, my mouth was sticky, and I was lying on my side, staring over at the orange rat-eyed light on the side of this datapad as it made another cooed-soft chrono chime, announcing a newly arrived message.  I pushed myself up onto my feet.  My boots  lay on the floor in a drooled heap of laces, and my key-card was inside the wrinkles of the blanket.

But I haven’t any more time left for that:  the opening day of school is tomorrow, and I still have a few things left to organize in the classroom.  Then, three more days from now, I will have my first meeting with Killeshandra and Juniper Darksun.  And oh yes:  I have yet to read, let alone mark up, the essay draft from Killeshandra hovering in my letter-box.

I went out into the courtyard-garden behind the hotel.  There was a whispered-faint breeze coming from the humidifier, and Avila, the owner and my landlady, was tending to one of the bony little limon trees growing from the creekbed of bloodstained red soil.  I could see the long violet blue skirts of her dress swaying through the leaves before she stepped out, with her basket hanging from her arm with three small bitter limons inside.

Avila is a Twi’lek woman.  She looks to be in her middle forties, though I know (from what she has told me in passing) that she is actually at least fifty.  She has several faded teastained brown flowers tattooed on her lekku—bruise-scars, I suppose, from another life she used to have.  She must have been beautiful then, and you can (or I should say, I can) still see that in her.  Her pale dustdulled beige skin takes on a golden flush in certain lights, and she still knows how to walk.

She didn’t seem surprised when she saw I was there.  We went through the usual pleasantries, and then she continued on to the next tree, and I sat on the cloudgrey stone bench in the rock garden corner with my sketchbook.  I have started on my first several new pieces, though I can’t say that I expect to expand on any of them.  Yes:  I know Professor L. used to say in my performance reviews that I had a tendency to _kick myself too hard_ —but I don’t see how that is a problem.

Yesterday evening, after I left the bar, I worked on a charcoal image of the courtyard trees—but they came out looking too much like the graceful-boned, dancing trees in our orchard, and that was not the affect I had wanted to achieve.  Today, I brought out my chalk-pencils, and played around a little more with the one sketch of the tallest tree, and its burst of fluttering winged leaves; but then I turned over to the next page, and started to draw Avila. 

Of course, she knew I was going about it—I have never drawn a Twi’lek before (alas, I have met far too few non-humans at all), but I’m quite aware of the clichéd images everyone knows; I was so carefully nervous, that I wouldn’t be respectful enough, that my hand shivered on the first lines.  It wasn’t a portrait, so I had to remind her, though only a few times, that she should continue on naturally with what she was doing.

I do want to draw some of the people who live in this place—besides the obvious reasons, I have always preferred mythic portraiture to landscapes.  Yes, I know the figure is still passé in the Imperial Center scene, but  I don’t have to consider their opinions.

That does remind me:  I haven’t figured out how I will include art lessons with the rest of the curriculum.  Oh, my employers know I’m an artist, but they haven’t so much as mentioned the matter with me.  It seems likely, from my few educated assumptions, that they would tolerate the idea—but I could only do it once a week, and it would only be with the youngest students. 

I would actually work better with the older ones--but even if they are interested, and it might well be several years too late for that, they have to focus on the general, the _practical_ , subjects.  No one has needed to tell me the arts are a luxury here.  But I also know that they chose to hire me, if only in part, because I can teach the children things that might prepare them for lives in the universe outside this world.  They already know how to go about fixing a farm sweeper-droid.

I told Avila as much at luncheon, and she only lifted her eyebrows, and:  _Well, I can only wish you luck.  You’ll have to deal with moisture farmers on that_.

There is a public dining area in the barroom—but so far, I have taken my meals with Avila and at least several of the other residents in the privacy of the kitchen.  She is actually (and oh, I know how condescending that looks when I have it written down) quite a good cook.  Today, she had made up a mint-spiced fowl dish with a yogurt side.  Actually, I thought it was a pudding at my first dinner here, because it’s blue—a pale summersky blue.  But it is only plain yogurt.

Brother Mercy mentioned the Bantha Kid when he asked Avila if he has sent her a message from the faraway reaches of the polar canyonlands.  Apparently (as I had already heard) that was where he intended to go when he left three weeks ago.  Oh yes:  the Bantha Kid rents the room, the one that is presently a silent lightfilled box, across the hall from me.  I thought it was empty when I first moved in, but I soon learned otherwise.

It shouldn’t have come as a dramatic surprise.  After all—and I have read over what I wrote in this journal-file to be certain—Ciaran did say quite clearly that _the Kid_ , as Avila calls him, lives here in Avalon when he isn’t out on his haunts in the desert.

When they came to a pause, I was moved to speak:  _What does he do out there_?

And Avila said, though I hadn’t expected an actual answer:  _You can ask him when he finally drags himself back in.  He’ll tell you_.

Perhaps (as I went on to tell them) I shall do just that.  I have heard several varied stories about him so far, and I don’t know how much of them I should believe.  But I’ll have to write further ruminating words on that another, later time.  The afternoon “sunshour” is nearly over, and I need to go back over to the classroom.  I have several last things I ought to finish up there.

\--

The first two days of school are over now, and I do think (though I have hesitated to write it up into actual words) that it has gone well enough.  There are fifteen students in all—and of course, that includes the three faraway pupils in Rusted Rock, who have to attend their classes through the static-blurred holoconnection I have worked out.  Obviously, as I knew to expect, they vary quite a bit in age:  the youngest one is only just five years old, and the eldest ones are around fourteen, though I think one of them might be lying about her age.  And while most of them are _humans_ , I am pleased that I can say not all of them are.

When I arrived to unlock the classroom building on the first dark morning, a group of them were already waiting out in the front yard.  Many of the girls wore what must be their best frocks—floral print dresses that are trimmed with ribbon and foam-white lace, and tie in the back with apron strings.  I thought, rather absurdly, that those flowers growing on their dresses are the only ones here.

There were several adults, all of them women, with the youngest children.  They were dressed in the more usual coarse, and practically plain, desert clothing.  I wasn’t certain how to go about approaching them, but then the first woman decided that for me.

Her name, it turned out when she introduced herself, is Gaila Jensen, one of the employers I corresponded with a few times.  She manages a garage at the fringes of the town, which may explain why I hadn’t seen her before this.  She had her sandbrown hair done up in braided rolls that were not unlike a few of the traditional villages styles, and some of the eldest girls had done the same.  It might be, I think, one of the few ways in which I fit in here.

She managed the talking for the welcoming party.  While we spoke, her little girl, Wenché, cringed back against her skirts with her limp black hair hanging in her face.  And no:  she is not the youngest child I referred to; that is a little boy who only speaks in garbled stutters, and who is too young still to be at school.  She is (as I knew from her mother’s letters) already seven years old. 

Wenché Jensen twisted a handful of the skirt of her coarse mudred frock, and Mx. Jensen patted at her shoulder, and told me, with only a hint of apology:  _She’s just shy_.

But finally, nearly ten minutes after I had intended to start class, I turned towards the opened door, and: _I’m sorry_ , I said, and I made certain to give a shivering harmless smile along with it. _Once again, I do appreciate the welcome. But it’s time to get along with things_.

Oh, I was sorry--I don’t wish to offend the people who pay my salary, and that is aside from the faraway more important issue of making a cultural mistake.  But I had to make it clear I shan’t be running the school on “desert time.”  Mx. Jensen seemed to understand that when she snapped out a nod, and said:  _Of course, Miss. Good luck today._

And I am afraid I needed it:  the first few hours of that day were the most difficult.  It soon became quite obvious that I would have to make some adjustments to the lesson plans I had sorted out when I was still on Naboo.  I must admit I am still working some of that out.  I have also had to admit that I lack a gift for working with children below the age of reason—but then, the youngest student I have ever taught before now was eleven years old.  I had not expected on dealing with a child as young as little Daffyd, but at least he doesn’t appear to mind.

This evening--after I had to discourage Thinta, one of the older students, from taking on that role when she was supposed to be focused on a maths review—I have been considering the idea of taking on an assistant to help with the younger children.  I certainly have enough students for it.  But I shall have to think on that more before I even mention it to my employers.

There are four older students at the age I am more used to working with—and while I’m not certain that I know how to teach these ones, they have been, _mostly_ , tractable.  Joelle is a pale rosehead, and Thinta is dark.  They are both fourteen years old.  Diva Minera is a Theelin girl with a mousenest mess of purple hair. She gave off a little harp-shriek giggle when she introduced herself and told me, obviously lying, that she is fifteen. 

And of course:  just behind them is Gerda, the Rodian girl, who is twelve.  It shames me to have to admit--even here in the silence of a private file--to my appalling ignorance, but I only knew she was female from the sagging floral print frock she was wearing.  She does have orange hair, but she wears it in a short masculine brushfringe.

Yesterday, I implemented the first storytime during the last hour of school.  It was nearly the sunshour anyhow, when the students are accustomed to resting.  But while I had hoped to hear some of their own local folklore stories, they wanted me to tell them about Naboo.   Of course, it is natural  enough that they would be curious about the world I come from.  They liked hearing about the various animals, in particular the tuskcats at the mountain lodge.  They were not impressed, however--or hesitant in saying as much--when I told them about our Queens.

I would have thought that Thinta and Joelle (and especially Joelle) would find interest in the idea of a girl, only around their own age, who was elected to rule an entire planet.  I didn’t get around to mentioning that our present Queen, _Her Imperial Majesty Kylantha_ , must be at least forty years old.  It was obvious they didn’t—and perhaps they were right not to see much of a resemblance in the holopicture I showed them of Queen Apailana, a doll of a girl in an elaborate black dress with crusted pearl cuffs.  It would have cost more creds than their parents earn in a month.

I remember that, when she was elected, I was eleven, only one year younger than she was.  But I knew, of course, without having to think on it, that I was nothing at all like her.  And no, I’m not referring to what must be the obvious—that she was a _strategic genius_ , and I hadn’t so much as applied to the youth political programs.  We don’t want a Queen we can identify with.

I explained to them, at some length, that the Queen is a figurehead who represents our planet—who is more, who is _better_ , than a mere human girl.  But Joelle only interrupted  me to say, in an unusually flat voice:  _It sounds like you lot all worship them_.

 _Yeah_ , said Herme, the little blue-skinned Twi’lek boy, with a shivered whip of his left lekku, and Diva Minera finished with:  _Sorry, but the bitches sound too much like one of the Hutts for my liking.  They just happen to be a lot prettier_.

Oh yes—she compared our Queens, including _Amidala,_ the one name they already knew, to the petty crimelords running things on this planet.  I corrected Diva Minera’s language lapse, and allowed that there are some aspects of the ancient Grizmalti moongoddess worship still present in the figure of the Queen.  Then I opened the floor to other stories.

Of course, Joelle snatched that opportunity to start with telling one of her stories.  I won’t go into the details, though it was clear Thinta was familiar with it. Joelle tends to dominate the classtime with her constant talking, though I do think that Thinta and Diva Minera are both far more intelligent than she is.  But she is clever enough to know when to stop, so I haven’t had to give her a silence time.  I allowed her to finish, and then made certain Herme had his turn.

Oh, and I should mention this:  the Darksuns have been delayed.  Apparently, one of the banthas in their herd had a difficult delivery, and the calf isn’t likely to make it.  But Annah Darksun assured me they should be leaving their farm (and I still cannot help but think  that a farm in a desert is an oxymoron, though obviously, I know to keep this opinion to myself) in another few days. I should get to reading through those essays then.

 ---

This afternoon, I stopped in the shadowsoft cold of the barroom to visit with Avila while she was working on her inventory files.  I had only been there for around five minutes when this woman entered in from the wilting sunlight in the street, pausing only long enough at the doorway to knock out a little teacup-rattled tap.  She was well turned out:  she wore a wine red velvet frock with a swollen balloon heap of skirts, and a little silver hat (with a stuffed dun-furred bird attached, rather _showily_ , to the band) arched in a perch on the side of her perfectly glossy cinnamon hair.  Obviously, she fancied herself as some sort of _lady_.

She stood there in the window of light on the floor.  She tapped her (dainty, doll-hooved) foot in a chrono tick.  She arched her thin black silk ribbon eyebrows, and then she spoke:

 _Well, good afternoon, Avila.  I didn’t mean to interrupt anything of importance_.  She arched her mouth into a tiny rosebud kissed smile.

 _You’ve never let that bother you before_ , Avila said, letting each word fall out with a boot-stamped thud.  She was still standing at her place behind the bar counter, her arms crossed into locked bars over her chest, and her eyes were black and glasshard.  This woman might have spoken her name with a careless, knowing ease, but oh, I could see she was not Avila’s friend.

She  continued:  _And all I have to offer you is a nice lukewarm ABP.  What do you want, Madame.  Because I know you want something_.

The woman let her breath out in a fluttering mothwinged sigh, and widened her eyes.  _Oh Avila.  I thought I ought to come over and see the new schoolteacher._

She turned her face to look at me, and snapped out another little smile.  It was obvious (and yes, I think I would noticed it even if Avila hadn’t been glaring in the background) that this woman choreographed her every gesture.  Our district Princess uses a version of that same smile.  Of course, she is another grimly virginal sixteen-year-old political wonder, while this woman—I could see now, through her whiteface powder—was clearly no longer young.

She allowed her hand, locked inside a pale doll-skinned glove, to drift towards me.  _You must be Miss Taafe.  It’s a pleasure to finally meet you_.

 _Likewise_ , I said—and while I had intended it to sound politely distant, my coldly mean voice made the word sound like a slamming door.  I took several hovering steps back, and the woman let her hand fall back into place against the sides of her skirts.

But she didn’t leave quite yet:  _Well_.  (She said, letting that one word float out.)  _I have other business to attend to, but I would like to invite you to my establishment, Miss Taafe.  We don’t often get women there, but, and I am this bold, I think you might find it agreeable._

Then, while I stared at her (in a way that I still hope seemed coldly amused , rather than confused), she swayed back out onto the streetwalk, her brightdark skirts floating around her.  Oh—and she nearly knocked over the little droid trotting towards her into a heap of little silverware-silver stick limbs out in the dusty floor of the street.  I should mention that last part.

I went back over to the bar.  After another few long silent moments dripped past, Avila spoke, watching the casket-box of beer bottles she was unloading:  _She must have seemed like a fine enough lady.  And I suppose she does make a fair imitation of one.  So you must have been wondering what I could have against her_.

Of course, I had been curious, but I hadn’t even thought of asking her to explain.  It wasn’t my concern to know.  But she told me:  it seems this woman, _Madame Aramat_ , owns the grand, and rather showy, midsummer white cake house I have noticed standing out of place along the main street.  She refers to it as a “dancing hall,” but (and I quote Avila on this) the women there do a great deal more than dancing.  They belong to the Madame—they are either slaves she brought with her, or ones she _inherited_ from the previous pimp when she kicked him out to the kerb with her dainty heel  only two years ago.

But despite all of that, Avila has to go along with tolerating the Madame.  She pays around ten percent of her proceeds to the local Hutt syndicate lieutenant—and as his part of the arrangement, he has left her, and the rest of the town, alone.  It might not matter, though I’m certain it doesn’t hurt, that several of his main enforcers are known to regularly frequent her _place_.

( _We can only guess at what the Gamorrean one finds of interest there_ , Avila said, but she let her hahaha drag off when she saw I wasn’t amused.  It really was not a joking matter.)

It must be the last, black hours of the night right now.  I haven’t dared to open the chrono time on this datapad to know for certain.  Last night, I heard, or only thought I heard, a thorn-sharp animal cry out in the darkness, but I haven’t heard one single thing through the hovering silence.  I ought to have been asleep hours ago; it will still be dark when I have to wake up, and I need to be rested, and sharp, to manage things at the school.  It isn’t as though I’m not tired.  I am tired, but I can still feel the scattered words drifting about in my thoughts.

Avila didn’t reveal anything that shocked me.  I am not so naïve, even though I was raised up to be—oh, I know, even if it was only in the abstract, that the Empire allows slavery, even in the Core worlds, and _especially_ when “aliens” are involved.

But I can’t quite believe—even though I can still see the fresh memory of it clearly—that woman had the audacity to invite me to her brothel as a customer.  But oh, she most certainly did, and she was serious about it.  It feels as though she had cracked open my journal files, and drank up all the words, and known every last thing she wanted to about me.  Of course (and I must have shown a flash of anger, because Avila told me as much ) she doesn’t actually know me at all.  But I have to suppose that, in her trade, she has learned how to read people.

However:  while I would prefer not to be celibate, I should think I can manage it for a few years.  I am not so desperate to have a woman, or man, in my bed that I would go pay for it.

But I think that is enough of that for now.  I’m tired enough that, when I look over what I’ve written, I can’t focus enough to actually read the words.  I had better, and finally so, retreat into bed.  The next cold rawsharp winter morning will be arriving soon, too soon, enough.

 ---

There was an older desert-burned couple waiting for me in the barroom after school today.  The Darksuns had arrived  this morning, only a week too late, and they had already set up their camp in the public area out in the scrub behind the courtyard.  Annah Darksun wore a sand-dry wool robe over a long skirt with scattered fireflame flowers on a blue velvet background, and her husband,  Delight Fardreamer, was dressed for  work on his farm.  They were sharing an expensive glass of limon water, and they were actually, truly holding hands on the counter.  Then my last two students, Killeshandra and Juniper, came wandering in from the courtyard to see what their mother wanted.  It turns out that the _little darlings_ , who I have only known before now as the ghost-voices of their written essays, are actually behemoths: 

Juniper is a towering tall, awkward-boned tawny blond bear who stood with his shoulders hunched into a slump.  When he  looked down at me, I saw that he has a long thorn-pointed nose, and gloomy soft grey eyes.  Killeshandra has the figure of an ancient warrior-queen.  I am reasonably tall for a woman, and she looms for a head above me.  She has thick black-winged eyebrows, and her nightblue floral print frock strained over her broad shoulders.

Since I have only had several brief shallow interactions with them, I don’t have much else to say of them.  But I did notice that Killeshandra greeted me formally in her thick gruff voice; and that Juniper, after his mother gave him a pinched-sharp look, mumbled out a single blurred word.

Mx. Darksun--or since I do want to respect her wishes, _Annah_ \--invited me to share dinner at their campfire.  I thought it the polite thing to accept.  Afterwards,  I went for a walk with them in the evening-soft purple light.  I wore my new whipstiff black sunhat.  Killeshandra walked along behind us in the distance, and Juniper had gone to read, or sulk, inside his tent.  The sand is different than how I imagined it:  it is dark, and soft, soft as dust, and it rumpled easily into prints underneath the heels of my boots.  When I dared to look up into the sky, the first bruised-red sun had begun to sway down towards the ragged shadow-silhouette of the far off mountains.

Mor would refer to Annah as _a lovely woman_.  But it is actually true:  she is nice, even if it is in an odd way, and while I can’t logically explain it, it feels as though I have known her before.  Delight is a severely plain man—except for his intense icepale blue eyes.  She managed most of their part of the conversation, and he seemed to prefer to listen in.

But he did tell me the answer as to why his children didn’t inherit his name:  _I have my mother’s name, and I wanted them to take theirs.  That’s how it ought to be.  After all, you don’t need a bloodtest to know who your mother is_.

But otherwise, they wanted to discuss their children’s educational futures.  They are, if only legally, already adults—Killeshandra is seventeen, and Juniper recently turned nineteen.  They want Killeshandra to earn an honors-level result, which I would expect, but they have something more specific in mind for Juniper:  they have hopes that he will score high enough for a place at the naval academy.  And—as Delight spoke up to emphasize—they want him to “make officer.”

He went on to say:  _If he’s going to be in the stormie ranks, he might as well stay here and collect the morning frost off the sand.  The navy can get its boom fodder somewhere else_.

 _Oh_ , I said, a single empty nod of a word.  I have to admit to some surprise—I would have expected, from what I have heard of the farming mindset, that they would want one of their children, and probably Juniper, to continue on with their farm.  But they don’t.  Annah said that Delight took over the place from his uncle’s widow; and he has at least several nephews who haven’t much prospects he wants to pass the favor on to.

Tomorrow, I will have individual meetings with Killeshandra and Juniper, where I plan to discuss how they might go about revising the red-scratched over essays I have returned to them—and they should have their packets completed for me.  So far, I can say that they both know how to write a proper constructed sentence, but they aren’t quite so good with ideas. 

They shall be staying here for another few days while their parents are managing some of their business affairs, so I have been thinking on some books Killeshandra might like.  I don’t think I would know of anything Juniper would actually want to read.  No, I haven’t mentioned this to their parents—but then, I should think it would be evident that this is part of my job.

 ---

As I walked back through the town to the hotel this afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice the dancing hall , even when it was still in the distance.  The Madame’s frilly sunglowing white mansion of a _place_ looks off against the other buildings, and the kilometers of scrub fields behind it.  I was, for a sudden and illogical moment, flushed with nervous heat.  Of course, Joelle didn’t take any notice.  She continued to talk as she walked along beside me, her flower-bruised skirt swaying around her legs.  Oh, she did pause—when she had step out of the way of a cart that came thrashing towards us through the crowded market area.

The driver, a _human_ man with drooping blonde hair and matching skin,  leaned over his animal’s head to glare at her with his black insect-eye goggles, and threw out one word in loud, obvious Basic.  I cringed, but Joelle’s watercolor blue eyes actually gleamed with candleglow tears, and she charged ahead of me for several steps.

Killeshandra had been walking just behind us with Joelle’s younger sisters, two shy, or merely just quiet, little rosepinks who have yet to cause me any difficulties, or do anything of interest.  She watched as the cart barged away ahead of us with a coldblank stare, but she didn’t comment.  The girls were occupied with a dust-shadowed white astromech droid rolling along  next to them.

It might actually be midwinter, but the air was the usual tear-blurred shimmer with the light beating down from the paired suns—I could feel it as it burned into my hair, and it seemed to soak my dress, my skirts, into a swollenthick weight that dragged as I walked, and there was candybright sticky sweat on the backs of my knees.  I could feel all of that.   But the other people moved about through it with familiar ease—and I have to assume I shall learn that soon enough.

There was a rather awkwardly stiff moment while Joelle wiped at her eyes.  No, she didn’t lick the saltwater of her tears from her hand, but I would not have put it past her.  When I reassured her, she actually said (while I had to watch out for passing people and droids for her) that:  _I would have thrown him the finger, but there wasn’t enough time for it_.

Obviously, she lacks the nerve to do more than imagine that sort of gesture, but I still said:  _Then it’s a good thing there wasn’t_.

Joelle moved on to another subject. It appears that she has decided to think of me as some sort of confidant.  Of course, I haven’t encouraged her—it is not the thing to burden others with your problems.  But while I was taught to know that since my earliest memories, Joelle isn’t from Naboo, and it does not require that much effort for me to try to be sensitive.  This time, she wanted to share an incidence that occurred when she was ten years old—she had been playing on this swing her father had made from an old starship landing wheel when the rope broke, and she fell and blacked out for several seconds.  It sounded as though she had a concussion, for an hour later, when she was confined to her bed, she vomited.  Oh yes, she included that last detail.

The white wall of the “dancing hall”  was looming ahead just down the street.  I forced myself to look at Joelle, and asked her if her parents had taken her to a physician.

She tossed her eyes up in an sighed out roll, and her voice—which is a muddydeep tenor, and not what I would have expected—hurried up a pitch.  _They wouldn’t have bothered even if they could afford it.  And they refuse to use Quinnan’s meddroid_.

We were approaching the _brothel_.  It was the late quiet hour of the afternoon, but there was already (or still) business in progress there—the Madame keeps a well-stocked bar, and she also offers actual, and expensive, water baths from ice shipped straight from Adriana.  I think some of the locals, particularly the farmers, object to that more than anything else.  Joelle turned to watch with me as a man walked in through the secretdark book page of the opened doorway.

There was a tall dark girl standing near a side entrance, smoking one of those little dried root cigarets.  She hissed out a breath of white fog smoke that floated around her face.   She only wore a fragile whiterose chemise the sunlight glowed straight and a ratted petticoat skirt, and her long ribbonsilk nightbrown hair was still loose.  Her chemise strap drooped down her shoulder, where her tawny-beige skin was just sunflushed.  Of course, I noticed her.

Then she stared out across the street at me.  Or at least, I thought she had—since then, I have thought it over, and she was most likely focused on her own thoughts.  But it only lasted for that one moment.  She turned away when the door behind her swayed open, and I walked on.


	3. Chapter 3

The Bantha Kid has made his return.  He came walking across the scrub beyond the school this morning when I was outside with the students for our activity time.  The sky was still this early sleepfaded blue white, but I had stayed back inside the shadowroom from the porch roof to supervise them.  I was watching Joelle’s sisters working on building up a shivering balanced rock cairn when I saw him, when I saw a man in a black hat appear on a sloping rise.  He simply _appeared_ —I can’t think of another way to go about describing it.  I walked out into the pale light of the schoolyard to watch him approach, and into the muscular wind smacking against my eyes.

The students had noticed him as well.  Today, I had them looking for examples of the varied, and many, rocks we have identified in this area, and now they paused at their work.  Diva Minera spoke first, squinting ahead into the opened sky, the wind pulling at the ties on her dress—and if I had only had an educated guess as to who he was before that, oh I knew now:  _He’s finally gotten back_!

Several of the others started out to meet up with him.  Yes, I know:  I should have called them back closer to the school, but I only thought of that later on.  Instead, I followed after them.  The man walked up to us with a hard wulf-loping stride, his bootprints stamped into the sand behind him.  That was the first thing I noticed about him.

Herme came up to next to me in a lurching skip, and he had a bright bell-rung voice when he called out, in the casual way they use here:  _I thought that was you_ , _Kid_.

 _Where have you been this time_? Thinta said next, her voice almost stern.  But her mouth leapt into a smile, and I knew her tone had only been another easy joke.

 _Hey kids_ , the Bantha Kid said as he came to a stop—though I should note that, while he is still relatively young, he is no longer what the people here call a kid.  He adjusted the sagedull green satchel he had in a hump over his shoulder.  _My most recent location was at the Calf-A.  But if you want the interesting version, that is gonna take a while_.

 _Oh I’ll bet you saw a krayt pack_ , Herme said, the words tripping together into an awkward mess—but he had spoken first, and the other students crowded around him nodded along, and fell into gasping, blushing giggles. I have noticed that Herme likes to draw krayt dragons,  and that when he has a story during the sunshour, it usually involves at least one pivotal  dragon scream.  Of course, I have not seen one—and Avila has told me that I don’t want to.

The Bantha Kid shook his head, and:  _There aren’t any dragons up in the canyons.  But next time out, if I see one, I’ll get a holoshot just for you_.

Then he looked over at me, and I found it easy, thoughtlessly easy, to stare back at him, even before he arched his (wide roseflushed) mouth into a smile.  After all--and I can admit to this inside the moonglow lit page of this journal--I had been watching him already. 

I have the chalkpencil sketch I drew of him, when I was back in my room this evening, on the last page inside my sketchbook, but I will have to use words to describe him here:  He is tall and thin with cat-mean, bony hips.  He has a crooked, bird beak pointed nose.  His skin is sun-flushed from the desert, but his hair is a light dull pale brown.  He has pale wintersky blue eyes.

I walked forward to meet him, and after he introduced himself, I said:  _Oh, I know.  I have heard quite a bit about you_.

 _That’s grand_ , he said.  The wind was tugging at his hat with its strong clenched fingers, and he had to hold it down.  _Some of it is probably even true_.

When he offered his free hand in greeting, I knew to take it.  I read somewhere once, years ago, that humans originally shook hands to prove they weren’t carrying any weapons.  We don’t do that on Naboo—but perhaps that is because it has been a number of centuries since we used the sort of weapons that could be exposed that way.  But obviously, it makes sense here.  Oh, I had already noticed the small blaster the Bantha Kid wore at his hip.

When I held his hand, I was surprised to see that he has fairly small hands, with long drooping fingers and chewed short nails—I would have expected him to have large hands, with coarse wooden calluses, rather like Delight Fardreamer.  Well, nearly like: Delight is known as a sternly hard worker, whereas the Bantha Kid is what Far Mor would call _fey-minded_.

Then he said:  _It’s probably too late for this matter, but I got this message from Ciaran Glass a while ago looking to see if I could give you a ride.  Unfortunately, I was about five hundred klicks too far away, and it was a week too late.  But I would have been at the rescue if I could have._

 _Well, I should certainly hope so_ , Diva Minera said. When I turned to look back  at her, she had her hands perched on her hips, but her mouth had shifted into a teasing smile.  I also saw that the Bantha Kid noticed her with a tiny startled jerk, though he didn’t say anything.

 _I appreciate the thought_ , I said—and then I continued (and no, I shouldn’t blame Diva Minera’s nearby influence for this) on to say, as soon as I had thought it:  _But if you have any regrets on the matter, you can always make it up to me some other time._

 _Oh, I’ll remember that_ , he said, and I felt my nervous sunbright flush fade away.  He grinned, and I tossed off a hahaha. It was all right.

Of course, the outdoor hour was not even half over, and I reminded the students that they needed to return to their previous activities.  I did not intend to ask the Bantha Kid to leave—several of the parents have sat in on lessons before—but that was when he excused himself:  _You’re probably tiring of me.  And besides, I should go see if Avila kept my room for me_.

 _Avila had to go to Bloodrock Station_ , I said.  She caught a ride out with her friend Min this morning.  _But you needn’t wait for her to tell you.  Yes, you still have your room_.

I watched with the students as he walked off around the side of the schoolroom, and back to the street.  Joelle had wandered over to stand next to me.  He had only just disappeared from view, and hearing, when she leaned in to say in a smokeflushed whisper:  _He_ _likes you_.

 _Oh, of course, he probably likes me so far.  Why wouldn’t he?_ I said, with a perky queendove-winged flight to my voice.  Joelle did not bother to dignify that with a response—but then, as I can admit here in writing, I can hardly blame her.

After school was finished, I met up with the Bantha Kid at the edges of the market, and he walked back to the hotel with us.  Joelle remained several discreet eavesdropping feet behind us with the two sisters, but I won’t go into that.  They were giggling with each other, but that was because the Bantha Kid had given them blush-stained white flower clips.  He kept one for himself.

Avila had returned to her place behind the counter, and there were only several customers (a _Chagran_ couple) at one of the corner tables in the dining room.  _Hey, Kid_ , she said in a purposely ragged-rough voice.  _Next time, maybe you could consider sending me a note.  It would entertain me, and I’d like to have proof you’re still functional._

 _And hey yourself, Avila_ , he said.  Then, while I sat nearby with the pinkberry cola I had just purchased to drink, they continued on with their conversation:

 _Oh come on_ , he said.  _It was my birthday only the other day._

 _Yeah, I know_ , she said.  _And the only present you’ll be receiving here is a spanking_.

 _Fine then.  I’m waiting_ , he said. She snapped her mouth into a grin, and came out to smack at him with her counter rag.  The customers both watched with what I think may have been approval.  Joelle came wandering in to buy a cola with the few creds she had managed to save up, but (rather mercifully) she didn’t stay around.  But I am sure she reported everything to Thinta.

Then they moved on to the subject of the Calf-A.  I hadn’t needed to ask him about it when he had mentioned to the students earlier:  Avila worked there as a cook for years before she took over the hotel, and so I know it is the restaurant, the _café,_ with the word play name.  _Oh, the Calf-A_ , Avila said, staring off in a daydreamed blur.  _I have to get back there one of these years_.

She handed the Bantha Kid a green lampshade glass bottle of beer with a thin wisp of smoke leaking out.  Of course, I make it sound better than the cheap Antilles’ Bantha Piss it was—and oh yes, that is the actual brand name.  Before I came here, I had never heard of it, but they all drink it, and that includes Brother Mercy.  I should force myself to have at least one, since I do want to fit in with them, but I haven’t done that yet.

He sat down on the stool next to me at the bar, and I remembered to take a drink of the sugary bubble hissing soda. Avila went back into the kitchen, and I heard the bellcrash of pots.  I waited for a silent moment while I considered what to say next.  But he spoke first.

 --

I don’t think I have written down anything of the local stories I have heard, including the ones with several different conflicting versions, about the Bantha Kid:  He was born to wander under the dragonstar!  He nursed from a wild bantha as an infant!  He _knows_ the desert, and respects all of its secrets!  He set loose a cirkus-trained nexu (or it might have been a rancor) from a syndicate supply-barge in Mos Alba!  He pulled a scam over on one of the Hutts—while successfully dressed as a dancing girl!  And then there is this one:  he is the “sexboy” for a _Tusken woman_!

But I should continue where I left off earlier tonight:  while we sat at the bar in the lazy honey-thick light seeping through the gauze curtains, I made the segue in the conversation, and asked if there was any truth to those legends.  He laughed—an easybright, almost honking loud laugh that showed most of his teeth.  I have noticed that other people here tend to laugh in a similar fashion, but it can still take me aback. 

Once he had calmed down out of that, he said,  _Well, damn.  It looks like my fictional double has been staying busy_.

I stared at him for a emptied blank moment before I remembered to say something:  _I gather that you found the bit about the Tusken woman the most amusing_.

 _Oh, that isn’t entirely wrong_ , he said.  _I do know a Tusken woman over near the Needles.  I would even dare to say we’re on friendly terms.  But I do not provide any sexual services for her—she isn’t interested, and it isn’t possible_.

Then:  _It was a sandcat. They were taking it back for rancor-bait_.  _I don’t know how they ever caught it—I’ve only managed to get a few glimpses of them out in the wilds, and I’ve seen more than most people.  Anyway, I only had a few seconds to act in, and I snatched the cage and got out of there.  I was fifteen at the time, but I can’t say I’ve learned to know better_.

 _And then you released it back into the desert_ , I said.

 _Of course, I did_ , he said.  _It bit me for my troubles, but I survived without a scar.  My older brother wasn’t too impressed, but I don’t think he was much surprised either._

 _Well, well_ , Min said.  She had turned from her conversation with Avila at the other end of the bar for some blatant eavesdropping, and she wasn’t the only one.  She lifted her black ribbon eyebrows. _Delight has kept that version of events to himself_.

The Bantha Kid shrugged, and tossed back a long drink of his “ABP” before he said:  _He says that people prefer what they’ve made up, and he has a point._

 _Wait—Delight Fardreamer is your brother_? I said.  The Darksuns hadn’t talked much about their other family—I did remember Annah mentioning, once and in passing, a brother of Delight’s, though his name was Sage, and that was all.  But I could see it now—while they don’t look obviously alike, they have the exact same color eyes.

 _Yeah, he’s one of my brothers.  The oldest and most hardworking one who had to take over raising me up.  I have five of them_.Then he said, with a ruefully subdued twist of his mouth:  _We still don’t know if Mumma skipped her control shots on purpose, or if she just forgot_.

Oh yes:  he put it out just that bluntly, and in those exact remembered words.  The others in the eavesdropping audience all nodded along with understanding.  I didn’t have anything to say.  No one has a family that large on Naboo—it would be considered  irresponsible and (the far worse quality we’re taught to shun from  the earliest hour of childhood) _selfish_.  They have much the same attitude here, only more so.  Most of the farming families can barely afford the one child.

 _Doesn’t your one brother still live with your mother?_ Avila was saying.

 _That would be Chastity, and yes, he is still at our mumma’s side_ , the Bantha Kid said. _Trust me, we don’t dare say one word against the woman in his presence._

When I first met Brother Mercy, and heard his Coruscanti-edged accent, I asked him why he had decided to come here.  The Bantha Kid did not ask me that same question.  But after the above, he did turn the conversation over to me: _So.  What stories do you have_?

That was also the first time he said my name:  he addressed me formally as _Miss Taafe_ , and while I did appreciate the thought, I told him he can use my familiar name.  After all, he isn’t one of the students who need to see me, at least _somewhat_ , as an authority figure.  But I couldn’t think of how to answer him.  Of course, it has been years since I had the need to talk about myself in public.  I  do have my journals for that.  I have far more interest in listening to other people’s voices.

 _Well, go on_ , Avila said.  _The Kid’s had his turn.  You certainly deserve yours_.

But after I stumbled through a shivered  little hahaed giggle, I shrugged, and:  _Oh, I don’t have much of a story.  I came from a perfectly ordinary background on Naboo, and now I live here, where I teach at your school._

He was watching me with a small titled smile.  It made him look too suddenly somber, and I blinked when I looked him back in the eye.  _There has to be more to it than that_.

 _Well, perhaps I shall share more of it with you another time_ , I said, I allowed, and his mouth relaxed.  And if I had a numbed-stone pain in my chest (because I’m a bore, I’m a typical privileged _human woman_ without a story anyone would wish to hear) it was already faded away.

Later on, Avila put on quite the dinner—partly for the Bantha Kid’s recent birthday, and partly because she wanted to try out the new ginger powder she found at the station market.  The Bantha Kid is thirty-two, which prompted Brother Mercy to say:  _Don’t even think of complaining that this is your first taste of getting old.  Some of us here only wish we could be thirty-two again_.

The Bantha Kid related some of his most recent adventures in the polar desert, and Avila  talked about her day.  After we finished eating, we went out into the courtyard-garden to have the limon crème cake Avila had made for desert.  The black sky was littered with heaps of pin-pricked white stars.  My breath flowed out in a long frostsilk scarf, but it was the sort of cold that almost tastes sweet, and in the background, Brother Mercy was describing his new telescope-lenses.

It went on for a long blurred stretch of hours.  I won’t go into writing out all the conversation topics they went through while we all drank up a bottle of black melon wine.  Brother Mercy left first, and then, finally, the Bantha Kid and I walked up the side staircase to our rooms.

We paused in the space between our doors, and I said (and yes: I think I will blame this on the two glasses of wine):  _Happy birthday.  You’ve lived through another day._

 _Well, thank you,_ he said, and then he disappeared behind the closed back of his door, and I came inside, and went straight on to finish spilling forth this day into a written account.  And I am still fully wide awake.  I have my window exposed for the night, and I can still see the ghostlights fluttering like moths down in the little trees.

 --

The dark girl I saw at the brothel is named Sarai.  Of course, I haven’t the nerve to openly, and bluntly, ask around after her--but Min is frequently at the bar to visit with Avila, and she likes to talk.   It turns out that Sarai is not only Madame Aramat’s _top girl_ , she is the preferred favorite of the syndicate lieutenant, Enji Day.  There was one time (according to Min) when he showed up to find out she was already tucked away in her “receiving room” with another customer.  Apparently, Enji Day wears these boots with sharp needle-pointed tips, and after he had his Gamorrean enforcer knock in the door, he knew how to put them to use.  That did not happen a second time.

When I asked her what Sarai thought of all that, she gave me a blank mirror-glass stare, and then shifted one of her limp lekku over her shoulder in what I think was meant to be a shrug.  _I don’t actually know_ , she said.  _But I would guess she enjoyed watching the spectacle_.

I haven’t seen her when I’m around the town, but then, I don’t think I have seen anything of the other girls from the Madame’s _place_ —and I gather, from what people have hinted at, rather than actually said, that she doesn’t allow them out much.

Then:  this afternoon, I was at the community store to have another dress made up.  Oh, I brought a lot of clothing here with me, but most of it has not been, rather predictably, suitable—there are really only a few dresses, and the one brown riding skirt, that I can wear.  They have a rack full of the floral print fabrics, besides the more usual homespun.  After I had selected the one I wanted, and put in the rest of the particulars of my order with _Mistress Grizelda Plath_ , Joelle’s mother, and she had excused herself, I spent some time browsing through them.

They have quite the variety of flowers arranged into different patterns.  This time, I picked the one with pale red roses on a burnt red background (and oh yes:  I do know that roseheads should not ever wear red, but I broke that rule a while ago), but I find them all interesting.  It might be mostly factory work, but I wonder about who designs the templates.  Someone must.

Actually: after the several rather painful, and humbling, days at school last week, I distracted myself by designing some of my own floral patterns.  I used up two pages in the sketchbook.  It was also, I should mention, the only drawing I managed for a while, for weeks, until yesterday, when I was inspired to sketch the Bantha Kid.

When I looked up and saw Sarai walking along the main aisle of the store, it took me a moment to recognize her as that girl I had seen.  She had her hair pulled into a sleep-tossed bun, and she wore a schoolgirl floral print skirt with tall desert boots.  But I did recognize her, and the other people in the store had as well.  Only Joelle’s sister Rosetta, who had come in to buy a handful of the candies they sell in baskets at the counter, was still focused on her own thoughts.

Sarai drifted along next to the shelves of housewares, only stopping to pick up one of the imported glass lace teacups she might have actually been able to afford.  Mistress Plath waited until she had looked up before she had to speak:  _Do you need help with anything_?

Mistress Plath is a short matron with doll-sized specs and faded blonde hair who always speaks in a candysweetened voice, and who prides herself on being _gracious_.  She has always been friendly with me, but I wouldn’t assume that means she likes me.  She treated Sarai the same way—even though she would take on a different tone when she gossiped about it later.

 _No_ , Sarai said—and her voice was huskydry, and not the deep swanhonk I had thought she would have, somewhat like Joelle’s.  _But thank you_.

She went on down the aisle, and I turned back to the fabric rack.  But I couldn’t seem to keep my attention on the floral bouquet design on the sunshine-yellow background I had been studying.  I was aware of Sarai’s footsteps as she moved about—and not for the reason the two women behind the counter, and the scattering of other customers, were.

Then she stopped in front of the racks next to me, and reached out to examine the corner of the dusty pink fabric with scattered red and ocean-teal flower bunches.  Thinta has a dress with that same print.  I could just see her hand move at the edge of my eye as she dropped the fabric again.  She was there, it seemed, just to look into having something made up--after another minute, she managed to catch Mistress Plath’s attention at the counter, and she went over to arrange her order. 

I continued on to the shelves at the back of the store:  since I received my monthly salary payment in my bank account this morning, I had other things to buy.  I could have bought that glass-lace cup along with them, but I knew I wouldn’t.

When I reached the counter, I allowed another customer—a woman with a baby riding in the sling on her back—to cut ahead of me in the line.  While Mistress Plath wrapped up her bundle of indigo-stained, and practically dull, _homespun_ , Sarai took her place behind me with her items.

Then she surprised me by speaking:  _I like your frock._

 _Ah, thank you_ , I said, the words falling out as I exhaled, and turned towards her.  She watched back with a politely serious look—and this time, I knew she saw me.  She had looked tall, with long rambling legs, from across the street, but she is only just around my own height.  She had bruised-pink makeup around her eyes, and I noticed a series of tiny numbers written in a burnt black tattoo on the side of her upper right arm.  Then she shifted, and it was gone.

She must have known that both of the women at the counter were watching, because she went on to say:  _It suits you.  And it has the added benefit of flattering your arse_.

That might sound bold—but several other people I won’t name yet had noticed that before, and on Naboo:  _I’m afraid that is mostly by accident.  It wasn’t the seamstress’s intention._

Of course, she already knew who I am—everyone in the town, and that apparently includes the girls hidden away in the Madame’s _place_ , has heard of the offworlder teacher.  But when I made my introductions, as I left the store with her, she didn’t let on that she had heard my name before.  She introduced herself with her one name, and:

 _That’s all of it_ , she said:  and I wonder again, now, if she was waiting to see if  I would show any cringing-shocked discomfort.  _Some slaves have a family name, but I wasn’t that lucky_.

When I apologized—and oh, I can still feel the pinched-sharp guilt, that I have always a family name, and that I had never thought I was fortunate for it—she  said:  _There isn’t anything to be sorry for.  It isn’t as though you could have known that._

We were standing on the mudbrick walk across the flat sandy street from the store, and the stainedwhite back building where Joelle and her family live.  She is (and I ought to know) ashamed of it, and I can understand that: it is surrounded by a crowded heap of old rusted-dead speeders, engine parts, and the metal skeleton of a bed frame.  Her father never throws anything away.  I could not see Joelle, but Rosetta and the other sister, Isabeau, were playing on a tire swing swaying from a rope tied to the end of one of the roofbeams.

Sarai watched them with me for the last moment before I had to walk on.  She must have resented, or even loathed, them for the way they were playing around at an age when she must have been put to work, but I couldn’t tell from her expression.  The little girls hadn’t seen us.  Rosetta had given the swing a push, and Isabeau was sailing up, her rosebud printed dress swaying in the wind.

\--

The sunshour was fading when I wandered out into the north end of the courtyard.  It is (as Brother Mercy thought to mention this morning) the first open moon night, and I could just make out the one swollen-full stained pearl moon against the hard blue sky.  The Bantha Kid was already there.  Avila had asked him, earlier at luncheon, if he would check on one of the plants in that area.  He stood inside the shadows of the pet juniper tree’s branches with his thumbs tucked into his trouser pockets, staring out across the scrub.  I can only wonder at what he saw out there.  But I do know that, whatever it was, I haven’t learned how to see it.

Then I heard it:  a faint lurching metallic-sharp echo off in the distance. It must have been from the scavenging vehicle the little dark people, the _Jawas_ , who have been camping here in the area drive around.  Then the sound blew away with the thrashing wind, and the only sound came from the whispersigh of the humidifier fan.

After another moment, the Bantha Kid turned back, and it only took him several steps to come over and join me in front of the circular rock garden.  We stood there in the dreamsoft silence, looking over the little sharp-clawed plants in the bone-rock littered desert soil.  Avila has told me several of the names, but I can only remember one:  the one with the nest of finger-pointed green leaves that are plush with juice she uses to treat sunburn.

The Bantha Kid tilted back on his heels.  He still has that flower from the market clipped to the side of his hat band.  It makes him look silly—but it also, and mostly, makes him look the part of the rambling and _mysterious_ trickster he is in all those stories.

Of course, while we stood there, I had to remember back to Joelle telling me (and I might have put on an obtuse act, but I knew her obvious meaning) that he _likes_ me.  But now that I have known him for several days, I don’t think there is anything to it.  He doesn’t act any differently with me than he does with the others—and if he were attracted to me, he would, he might.  And regardless: this all came from Joelle.  It isn’t as though she would know how to see that.

This time, I found a way during the conversation to ask him his real name.  Well:  it does feel off to refer to a man around my own age as a “kid.”

I have considered asking before this, but I didn’t have the chance--and quite obviously, I wasn’t certain it was a question he would want to answer.  But he did:  _My name’s Jewel.  And in case you were wondering, I do still use it sometimes.  Annah and Delight never stopped_.

 _I have to admit that I’m not really surprised_ , I said.

 _Yeah, I know. It would’ve been a surprise if I had a regular name_ , he said. _But at least I’m pretty sure I’m not named after that Hutt shithole_.

 _She might have been more specific, and named you something like, oh I don’t know_ , I said, and I felt my mouth twitch into a teasing smirk.  _Ruby.  Or Opal, or Emerald_.

He laughed at that, and:  _Well, I can’t tell you what she was thinking.  I do know she tried to improve the next time, because my younger brother is called Diamond_.

Of course, I know all about unusual names from the one side of Mor’s family:  I do have that one greatest aunt, who still lives in remote contemplation on one of the Fa chain islands,  who actually has the name Loyalty.  Her mother must have hoped she would leave the family, and the faith, to be a handmaiden for some minor politics-flushed little dear.  Then there’s Peace—but my brother has never let his name hold him back from his true personality.

I told the Bantha Kid about that.  I have told him a little about Naboo, though I haven’t so much as mentioned our Queens—I can only imagine that he would be even less impressed than my students were.  He laughed again.  _Yeah, I can see how you really weren’t surprised.  And I think you’ve heard of my brother Chastity._

 _Oh, I have a cousin named Purity_ , I said.  _But that is referring to the purity of heart, rather than—the more carnal sort.  That wouldn’t do at all for a name_.

I watched as he reached back and caught a handful of his hair, and held it off his neck.  The courtyard roof was burning with a flood of sunlight, and he would have felt it.  He must have hardly thought of the gesture, but I wanted to capture it down in a drawing—probably a quickly sprawled charcoal sketch, the sort that I can never quite translate into a polished frozen painting.

After another while, I said:  _You may have heard that I’m an artist_.

 _Yeah, I have.  Annah told me when they were thinking about hiring you on_ , he said.  _I have to admit I was interested.  And I was beginning to wonder if you were ever gonna bring it up_.

Then, after that suitable introduction, I asked him if he would model for me. It felt as though I were asking him for more than that—for an evening date, or a _romantic_ promenade stroll.  I think I even blushed an overripe rosepink.  But he must have overlooked it, because he accepted.  He didn’t seem in the least embarrassed—and  no, he did not ask if I wished for him to pose in the nude.  I might bring that up later, but for now, I have other ideas in mind.

We have already figured out the arrangements for his first sitting:  I have noticed that when that doesn’t happen, one has a tendency to keep on forgetting things.  We shall be meeting up here, in the courtyard, tomorrow evening.  But I’ll have to write more about that once it has happened.

 --

Lately, I have waited until after everyone else has retreated to their rooms, and into sleep, to walk through the hall and take a shower of sonic light.  It is not even remotely what I would call (to quote  Thinta’s mother) _refreshing_ , but I can admit that it isn’t too unpleasant either.  And tonight, I finally, after putting if off for nearly a week, unfastened my hair to clean it.  I have been considering, if only idly, having it cut—it isn’t really practical in my current life to have waist-length hair.  Oh, I know it is my _best glory_ , but it is only hair, and it will grow back eventually.  But for now, I waited while the staticwhite waves combed, and combed, through it.

Then after I made my return to my room, I brushed it back into order, and picked out the one little snarled nest I found buried somewhere inside.  I remembered to apply the milkbright lotion I bought, the same stuff Avila uses, and which she recommended to me to begin with.  The sonic, and the sunburned air, had turned my skin as dry as paper.  With all that done, I can now sit down with this journal file to write, for the first time in a while.

The dusk-blurred hallway has been quiet for hours, but not everyone is asleep:  there was a flushedglow of light on the floor outside the Bantha Kid’s door, and I can hear the thudded echoes from his footsteps as he paces the floor of his room.

It doesn’t bother me—and actually, sometimes (and last night would have been one of those time) I fall asleep as I listen to him wander back and forth.  I can only image where his thoughts are roaming .  I should mention, though, that he can hold still well enough when he needs to.

I haven’t written about that first modeling session I had with him, though I have intended to.  We didn’t hold it in the courtyard after all—when we arrived, Brother Mercy was meditating in his preferred place near the juniper tree.  The Bantha Kid didn’t think it necessary to leave, but I thought, and I still think, it was the only respectful thing to do.  We wound up, after I considered the options, in this room, my room:  it gets a certain fragile melancholy light during the evenings.

I wanted him, as I made quite clear, to look _natural_.  Of course, as I have written before, I do understand that is rather difficult to manage when you have to remain posed that way.  But finally, he took his place on the velvetfurred settee I recently acquired from Jax Plath, Joelle’s father, and I sat on the edge of my (rigidly made up) bed, with my sketchbook balanced against my knees.  While I drew, I experimented with several different styles, mostly things that I thought of there on the spot--I knew that my usual style, the one that I am somewhat known for, wouldn’t do to depict him.  I haven’t any idea if any of it worked.  When I looked back over the results, days later, after I had the time to forget what I had done, I didn’t even know how to see them.

But this is the part I still remember, though I would rather not:  it seems the Bantha Kid really is interested in my work as an artist.  And he asked me this:  _Do you ever draw yourself_?

I had been telling him about some of my work from the last year or so, including “Dressed in grey/dressed in rain,” that triptych I withdrew from the Glasshouse, the one the Girl posed for--and though I can see now how it related, it seemed rather sudden. _No_ , I said, once I had turned over to the empty wall of the next page in my book.  _Never.  It’s not something I’m interested in_ _exploring_.

 _All right then_ , he said, and he almost arched his shoulder into a shrug before he remembered he wasn’t to move that much.  Then he left the subject, but I could tell he was confused.  I wanted to apologize, but I don’t think it would have helped the matter.

Of course, I am aware--I should write--that I am considered attractive.   I can recognize that when I look back at my image inside a mirror.  It was the reason I was popular as a model with my studio classmates--Rané would never have asked me to pose for that one _subversive_ thing she did for her honors exhibition otherwise.  But I did nothing to deserve that, and it is not something  I can take any pride in.  Actually, it has to be the reverse.

There is one mirror in my room-- a small teardrop puddle in a curly brown plastic-wood frame swaying from a green satin packing ribbon over the sink-bowl.  It can only show one piece of me  when I peer inside, and this is what I see:  my face is a pallid, bonedull, mask, a _human_ face that many people have to see in their nightmare memories.  My body (my legs, my _creamy dreamy_ arse, my breasts, my _artistic_ hands, my prim-faced cunt) is a parasite that only hurts others.  But of course, I did not burden the Bantha Kid with these thoughts.

But I have gotten off the subject:  after the session, the Bantha Kid walked about the room to stretch out.  There was one awkward moment when I wanted to offer to rub his shoulders, when I had even opened my mouth to begin saying it.

The next, and the most recent, time we did meet up in the courtyard.  It was one of the last pale stainedgrey winter mornings, and I  can only wish I had the right watercolor inks to capture the light that came with it.  I worked on refining some of my new styles, and I think I have made some progress with the results.  After it was over, and he had left to break his fast with the others, I was alone.  The humidifier fan almost sounds, when I have my eyes shut, like the whisper of a faraway creek.  It makes enough wind to move the leaves into a shivered rustle.

 --

The Bantha Kid has mentioned several places he knows in the nearby desert he thinks we ought to use for future modeling sessions.  It would be appropriate in several ways, and I can see that.  But I can’t find  much that pleases me in the landscape of dramatic rock castles, and needle-teeth, out beyond the scrub.  There is so very much that is wrong with this place:  the droid-parts dealer who has a shop at the end of the main street has three children there.  I saw one of them, a little Twi’lek girl with large violet-candy eyes and cheap flimsythin sandals, when I accompanied Avila on an errand yesterday.  They will not be attending my school, because they are slaves.

And they are not the only ones.  Avila may be correct when she told me, rather hurriedly, that only a few people (like _Madame Aramat_ ) have slaves here.  Apparently, it is a different matter in the cities, and the desert-oceans of the other hemisphere.  But that does nothing to reassure me—those few people are still too many, and thanks to the Empire, it is even openly legal. 

When I was at school today, I looked at my students, and I have to admit it: I could only see those children who can’t have their opportunity to learn.  I tried not to take it out on them, but there were several moments when I was rather shorter than I usually am.

I haven’t heard much about the Hutts.  It seems, according to what I have heard, that they prefer to hold court in their _palaces_ off in the open desert, but that does not then mean that they lack for influence here.  It may indicate the exact opposite—there isn’t much talk about Enji Day, and he runs this part of the territories, in part for his Hutt employer, but also for his own purposes.

Oh, and I do need to mention this:  they stole this place wholesale from the Tusken Raiders, who are the original inhabitants.  This was never mentioned once in the holonet articles I found.

But I should be honest, if only with myself:  beyond all that, the reasons behind my present state are selfish.  I don’t belong here.  Oh, I do understand, if still only mostly in theory, that there is life out in the scrub—in the secretly dug holes, around the bushes, and in the shadowed rooms of the canyons—but I can only see dead sand, and dead rocks.  When I have dreams I can still remember afterward, I never see this place, only the blinding green wood around the river at _home_.  There is no water here.  I can’t seem to get past that one fact.

I haven’t mentioned the reason they hired me on, instead of someone more appropriate, who is actually from this culture.  They wouldn’t have told me, but I did ask--I was the only applicant they received.  The few people here who have an education prefer to use it to leave.  Of course, they do. I don’t see how anyone could choose to live here.  I don’t know how anyone lives here at all.

 --         

Today was a rather exciting (and oh yes—unusually trying) one at the school:  I had three new students, instead of the one I had known to expect, show up.  Apparently, the two surprise students, Owain and his sister Aoifa, only just arrived in town with their _mom_ in the darkness of last night.  She had decided to move them here when she heard of the school.  While, of course, that is an admirable decision, I could wish it had been a bit less sudden.  They couldn’t even work on the basic skill review tests until I had a few things in order—beginning with finding enough chairs for them.  It is a good thing at times that Jax Plath saves everything.

Then, once I had that settled, little Daffyd had some sort of emotional fit.  I don’t know what set him off—only that he erupted into a screaming storm of tears, and accompanied by a failing of kicks and punches that shook his group’s studytable.  Wenché shrank down into a huddle behind the wall of her knees, clutching at their shared datapad, while the others prudently fled.

Oh, and none of the regular adult observers were present, so I had to enlist the help of several of the older students to manage that chaos.  It was Owain, one of the two new boys, who was able to talk Daffyd down--slowly, and eventually— into more subdued tears.  I think he even understood his twisted honks as words, which I usually don’t.  Daffyd’s plump mouth still shivered, but he wiped at his rain wet cheeks, and Owain guided him outside to the fresher-shed to clean up.

Wenché finally rose up into movement, and dropped the datapad with a plate breaking crack.  I let Thinta handle the results of that.  Meantime, Joelle remained off in the background, and I noted her mouth was in a closed-tight, _annoyed_ line.  I could understand the sentiment.

Afterwards, I sort of dropped down into my desk chair.  The only sounds came from the whisperwind of the humidifier fan, and a thud of cart wheels out in the street.  While I waited for the new students to finish with their tests, I wrote up, and then sent out into the holovoid, that request for a part-time assistant to my employers.   I prefer not to do my own work during classtime, but I was too tired to care.  Oh, and I just checked in to see if there was a response.

This evening, I wandered down to the bar to retreat into a drink.  I considered that this might be the time to try, and endure, an “ABP”:  but I decided it was better to go with something I would want to drink, and ordered a cosmic rose.  It’s this drink that Min picked up from a spacer reminiscing about her days on the “glitter-run.”  It only looks like a desert.

On my third drink, I was stirring the plump crystal-candy blooddrop (though everyone here calls them “sherries”) through the creamfoam layer while the Bantha Kid, who was sitting next to me, carried on a conversation with several of his regular compatriots.  He sat with his legs spread apart, and the stool creaked forward on its gawky fawn-boned legs, and so I had to keep my knees pressed politely together.  All of the men here sit like that.  They left me alone with my thoughts, and I let their voices fade into the background drone.

It was quite, and usually, busy—only minutes earlier, Diva Minera had shown up, and I had looked away when I overheard her voice putting in an order for a beer.  Of course, she is old enough to drink it, but I should pretend for the sake of her education that I don’t know that.

Then I overheard this:  _So_ , Killian, the black man who works as a traveling medic, who had a sherriebright silk-skinned flower pinned to the collar of his baggy drabgreen officer issue coat, was saying, _I can’t say that I’ve ever seen you as the modeling type_.

The Bantha Kid finished a drink of his beer, and:  _Surprise.  And no—since I’m sure this thought has crossed your mind, she hasn’t asked me to pose naked_.

 _I wasn’t gonna ask,_ Killian said, but I could hear the grin lurking in his voice.

 _You didn’t have to_ , the Bantha Kid said, and their nearby companions laughed.  Then he turned to me—and I will say he didn’t appear to be surprised to see that I had begun to listen in.  I shook my glass back and forth.  The sides were sticky with my fingerprints.

 _You never said we needed to make it a secret_ , he said, and I wondered what expression he had seen on my face.  He was right enough about that—though I had thought, I had assumed, he wouldn’t go around talking about it.

 _No, I didn’t_ , I said, and managed a little flame-licked smile. 

Then the Bantha Kid went on to tell Killian about those paintings of mine I described for him, and in particular “Dressed in grey/dressed in rain”—I showed him some of the holoshots I have on my datapad after his last sitting.  He doesn’t, by his own admission, have any formal arts education, but I think he did like it.  He doesn’t say things only for the sake of politeness.

But I must not have been clear enough about what happened with the Glasshouse, because I had to interrupt him to say:  _Yes, I did have it accepted at the exhibition.  But I didn’t say it was ever actually on display.  I had my entry withdrawn_.

They both stared at me, and it was the Bantha Kid who said:  _I don’t get it_.  _Whyever would you want to do that?  You said it was your first major thing as an artist_.

 _It was_ , I said, and pushed the sherrie down under the surface of the drink.  _And oh, I was excited enough at first.  But then I found out that all ten of the artists chosen for the exhibition were humans—the guest curator  didn’t even bother to include one token Gungan.  I  couldn’t live with that, and I withdrew to leave a space open for them to rectify that_.

They didn’t understand—but then I should have expected that, since my family, and too many members of my self-named _radical_ art circle, hadn’t grasped my reasoning either.  I will say that I heard that one of the other artists, a glassworks sculptor I mostly knew by name, followed my example and gave her withdrawal. But only that one.  Then they filled our spaces with two new humans—though, since the artists had originally all been women, at the least they brought in two men.  But I think I shall stop there.

 _It’s all right_ , I said—and oh yes, I shouldn’t have felt that vague disappointed ache.  It doesn’t matter when I still know I made the right, the only, decision.  _There shall be other exhibitions.  I don’t doubt that I’ll have another chance to show my work_.

 _Yeah_ , _maybe_ , the Bantha Kid said. _But you don’t know that for sure.  And I hope that if there is another time, you won’t find a reason to go and drop out again_.

Yes, he said that.  Sometimes, he does disappoint me, when he says the sort of thing people know to keep away in their thoughts on Naboo, and that was one of those times.  I won’t even go into what Killian said next when he expressed his honest, and blunt, thoughts.

But anyhow:  the Bantha Kid  has made enough creds to return to the desert, and he is leaving in the first dark hours tomorrow.  He has told us that he plans (and on that one word, Avila raised the first eyebrow) to be off for around a week.  While he is out there, I won’t have to know what I think about that, or about him.

That reminds me:  before I started writing this, I read over my most recent entries—and oh, I had forgotten that last stinging bit.  It was what I felt at that time, but that doesn’t excuse it. It is quite unfair, and worse still, _wrong-minded_.  I can admit here (where I am the only person to judge) that I was tempted to erase it, but I won’t.  That would be dishonest, and so it remains.

After I gave him the sherry from my drink, I finished it off in several swallows I didn’t quite taste. The Bantha Kid and Killian bought their second pair of “ABP”s.

Then:  Sarai came in through the front door behind an arriving patron.  But if she had sneaked inside, she stopped boldly in the open to look around the room.  She was well-dressed, in an inkblack velvet jacket with foam lace cuffs, though she wore it with a pale chemise-blouse with a swooping bodice that displayed her fabulous breasts.  It was Killian who said it, in a whisperedhiss:  _Well, well.  It looks like the Madame’s sent her top girl around for her_.

 _I suppose I’ll have to handle this_ , Avila said, with a shivered-weak sigh, and came out from around the bar.  I didn’t hear their conversation, but after a minute, Sarai followed Avila back into her office-space near the kitchen.  They came out again only moments later, and Avila was saying (as she played with a fisted-knot of her skirt):  _You know, you can stay if you want to.  Have a drink._

 _Thank you_ , Sarai said.  _But Madame Aramat is expecting me back_.

 _Oh, you can tell her I was being difficult_ , Avila said, when Sarai didn’t move.  _She was probably expecting nothing less, and I don’t have to always disappoint her_.

Sarai came up to the end of the bar and ordered, of all drinks, an “ABP.”  One of the men asked if he could pay for her, and she allowed it.  Then she ignored him.  I could see her reflection inside the room of the silver-glass mirror behind the clutter of liquor bottles as she took tiny primly proper sips straight from the bottle. She hadn’t looked—at least not directly, and obviously—at me.   When I have met up with her, for several brief nervously secret moments, she has been concerned for my reputation, even when I assured her I didn’t care what people thought.  And I don’t.

The man who had bought her drink was still hovering near her shoulder, and he finally said, in a hopefully blushed voice:  _You know, I’m kind of a big deal_.

 _That’s good for you_ , she said, and took another sip of her drink.  She was staring straight ahead, but I can’t know what she saw from the dim reflected light in her eyes.

That was, until she had made to leave:  she looked right at me, and her mouth made an ambiguous twitch.  I returned the gesture.  The Bantha Kid followed my line of sight over to her, and lifted his bottle in a tilt at her, and she nodded back in return.  Of course, I should not have been taken aback that he recognized her.  The Bantha Kid does seem to know nearly everyone.

It might have been a crouch-tensed moment, but it only lasted for that long:  and she had slipped away through the curtainsoft fall of light in the open doorway, out into the street, and then on to the whitecake brothel.  The crowd’s voices continued to swell around me at the counter.  No one else had even noticed.  I turned and pushed my glass back.  There was only a drooled bit of cream fuzz drink left, but I do know what my limits are.

The Bantha Kid  bumped against me (oh, accidentally, and absently) with the side of his knee.  And I reached down and gently, yet firmly, swatted his leg back over into place.  It must have been only the second time I have touched him, but it didn’t feel that way at the time.

 _You show him, Taafe_ , Killian said, and several of the nearby eavesdroppers joined him for a round of laughing.  I think one of them may have put his legs back together, though he would have forgotten, and reverted to his usual posture, a few distracted seconds later.

But:  the Bantha Kid only grinned at me inside the room of the mirror.  And I watched myself as I smiled, as my mouth sighed into a teasing snap, back at him. 


End file.
